Been hitting the comedy hard during these horrid and heartbreaking times, so today's post pays tribute to a guy who consistently got big laughs over six decades: the late, great character actor and comic Fred Willard, who passed on May 16.
Big laughs were Fred Willard's specialty. Here he is on Late Night With David Letterman.
First recall seeing Fred on TV as part of The Ace Trucking Company, an improv group which appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
In the following sketch, after a bit of slapstick, Fred plays straight man to the one, the only Billy "you can call me Ray" Seluga.
A few years later, Fred co-starred with Martin Mull in the satiric, outrageous and wonderfully silly Fernwood 2 Night.
Complete episodes of the series can be found on playlists on YouTube and Daily Motion.
Originated as a summer replacement for the hit series Mary Hartman Mary Hartman and set in the same small midwestern town, Fernwood 2 Night was an inspired sendup of talk shows and local TV productions.
Fred portrayed the astonishingly clueless and moronic, yet rather likable announcer Jerry Hubbard.
Did Fernwood 2 Night skewer small-town America and the cheesier aspects of 1970's show business clichés, television and Americana in no uncertain terms - and traverse boundaries of good taste in the process? Yes - with panache.
The individual favorite episode of Fernwood 2 Night/America 2 Night at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, hands-down, is the one in which Tom Waits ended up performing on the show because his tour van broke down in Fernwood.
In this and the 1978 followup series, America 2-Night, the always upbeat Jerry Hubbard, the dumbest talk show sidekick ever, not even equalled by John Candy's William B. Williams on SCTV, gets many of the biggest laughs.
Fred Willard and Martin Mull returned to television a few years later to satirize 1950's style suburbia hilariously and mercilessly in the comedy specials The History Of White People In America.
Fred would periodically appear in feature films had a short but extremely funny bit in a film loved by both the gang here and none other than the late, great TCM host Robert Osborne. . . This Is Spinal Tap.
Speaking of SCTV, Fred Willard was the guest star on a memorable episode of the comedy series.
Along with SCTV cast members and writers Catherine O' Hara and Eugene Levy, Fred Willard would be among the recurring actors in a quartet of splendid comedy features: Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. These movies represent a silver screen comedy gold standard for the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.
Improvisations based on the essential characters are the modus operandi of these films. Not surprisingly, most of the cast members started with Second City troupes or originated improv groups of their own.
Among the usual suspects on these four hilarious feature films, along with Fred Willard and the aforementioned SCTV alumni: director/writer Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer (from This Is Spinal Tap and The Folksmen), Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Bob Balaban and John Michael Higgins.
This post will finish with some recent Fred Willard appearances. Fred continued working constantly through his late seventies and eighties on such TV series as Everybody Loves Raymond and Modern Family, as well as Adam McCay's Anchorman movies. Comedian and late night host Jimmy Kimmel, who featured Fred frequently on Jimmy Kimmel Live, paid tribute.
Fred Willard was a guest on the talk show hosted by one of the funniest and most original of those current standup comedians who got their start in the late unlamented 20th century (along with Chris Rock and Gilbert Gottfried), Norm MacDonald.
The "coup de gracie" today is the following very funny SF Sketchfest tribute to Fred.
With a Max Linder top hat tip to those super talented individuals who made us laugh, it is not lost on us here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog that the comedy greats we write about are, for the most part, in the past tense (the Netflix show Schitt's Creek and the aforementioned standup philosophers notwithstanding).
No comments:
Post a Comment